The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not necessarily prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A majority of programs that are broadcasted on publicly accessible cable and television stations are divided into multiple separate program intervals that are separated by commercial breaks. Typically, a commercial break is of a limited duration that is less than the duration of the program intervals that precede and/or follow that commercial break. During the commercial break, the broadcaster that has been broadcasting the program broadcasts one or more advertisements (collectively called a “commercial pod”). These advertisements are not part of the program—such advertisements could be substituted with other advertisements without affecting the viewer's comprehension of the program in any way.
Typically, a multimedia device such as a digital video recorder (DVR) not only allows its user to play back content that the DVR has previously recorded (or is currently recording), but also allows its user to play back or fast-forward such content at greater than normal presentation speed. While the DVR is fast forwarding the content, the DVR skips over at least some frames of the content—frames that the DVR otherwise would have presented to the user if the DVR had been playing the content at normal speed. DVRs sometimes have the capability to fast forward content at different user-selected speeds, with more frames being skipped at faster speeds than at slower speeds. When a DVR fast forwards content at a significant speed, a user might be unable to comprehend with any clarity the content that the DVR is playing. Indeed, the user might not even desire to comprehend the content that the DVR is fast forwarding. Because users are often more interested in program content that occurs during program intervals than in advertisement content that occurs during the commercial breaks in between those program intervals, users often use a DVR's fast forwarding feature in an attempt to at least partially fast forward through commercial breaks so that the user does not need to spend time watching advertisements.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section. Similarly, issues identified with respect to one or more approaches should not assume to have been recognized in any prior art on the basis of this section, unless otherwise indicated.